Dialogue is charted up in the sound column of the dope sheet.

Dialogue is charted up in the sound column of the dope sheet. Each dope sheet represents 100 frames of animation or 4 seconds of screen time. Exposure sheets have frame numbers printed down one side making it possible to locate any sound, piece of dialogue, music beat or drawing against a frame number. This means that when the animation is eventually photographed onto motion picture film, it will exactly synchronise with the soundtrack.
Dope sheets and the information charted up on them provide an exact means of communicating the animator's intent to those further down the production chain so that everyone in the studio understands how all the hundreds or thousands of drawings are to come together and how they are to be photographed under the camera. (See your 'Exposure Sheet' notes for an example of a typical dope sheet). Dope sheets employ a kind of standardised language and symbology which is universally understood by animators around the world. Even computer animators use dope sheets! Get to know and love them.

ANALYSING DIALOGUE

There is an art to analysing dialogue. Sentences are like a continuous river of various sounds with few obvious breaks. More often than not, the end of one word sound flows directly into the next. It is our understanding of the rules of language that gives us the key to unlock the puzzle and to resolve each individual word.
English is not a phonetic language and part of the art of good lip-sync is the ability to interpret the sounds (phonetics) you are hearing rather than attempting to animate each letter of a word. For example, the word 'there' consists of five letters yet requires only two mouth shapes to animate, the 'th' sound and the 'air' sound. The word 'I' is a single letter in its written form but also requires two mouth positions, 'Ah' and 'ee'. Accents can also determine which mouth shapes you choose. Its actually easier to chart up dialogue in foreign language even though we can't understand it.
The simplest lip-sync involves correctly timing the 'mouth-open' and 'mouth-closed' positions. Think of the way the Muppets are forced to talk. Their lips can't deform to make all of the complex mouth shapes required for true dialogue, but the simple contrast of open and shut makes for effective lip-sync if reasonably timed. More convincing lip-sync requires about 8 to 10 mouths of various shapes. (See the attached sheet for some typical mouth positions).

IN PRACTICE

As you work through a dialogue passage, it quickly becomes apparent that the key mouth shapes can be re-cycled in different combinations over and over again so that we could keep our character talking for as long as we like. We can use this to advantage to save ourselves work. If a character's head remains static during a passage of dialogue, we can simply draw a series of mouths onto a separate cell level and place these over a drawing of a face without a mouth. Special care should be taken to design a mouth so that it looks as though it belongs to the character. Retain the same sort of perspective view in the mouth as you have chosen for the face to avoid mouths that look as though they are merely stuck on over the top of the face. Remember too, that the top set of teeth are fixed to the skull and its the bottom teeth and jaw that do the moving.
Sometimes the whole head can be treated as the animating 'lip-sync' component. This enables you to have a bottom jaw that actually opens and drops lower and also allows you to work stretch and squash distortions into the entire face. Rarely does any one mouth position have to be on screen for less than two frames. Single frame animating for lip-sync usually looks too busy. In-betweens from one mouth shape to the next are mostly unnecessary in 'limited' animation unless the character speaks particularly slowly. Therefore the mouth can snap directly from one of the recognised key mouth shape positions to the next.

BODY LANGUAGE

Talking heads can be boring and, without the richness of detail and texture found in real-life faces, animated ones are even more so. Gestures can tell us something about the personality of a particular character and the way it is feeling. Give your character something to do during the dialogue sequence. The use of hand, arm, body gestures and facial expressions, in fact involving the whole body in the delivery of dialogue, makes for something far richer to look at than just watching the mouth itself move. These gestures may wild and extravagant, a jump for joy, large sweeps of the arms, or as small and subtle as the raising of an eyebrow.
Pointing, banging the table, a shrug of the shoulders, anything may be useful to emphasise a word in the dialogue or to pick up a sound accent which helps gives the audience a clue as to what the character is feeling and absolutely gives the animated character ownership of the words. The delivery of the dialogue during recording will often dictate where these accents should fall. Mannerisms help establish character too. A scowl, a scratch of the ear, or some uncontrollable twitch or other idiosyncratic behaviour.

Use quick thumbnail sketches to help you develop the key poses that you believe will best help express the meaning and emotional content of the words and they way they have been delivered. Broadly phrasing the dialogue into sections where a key poses seems appropriate is a good starting point. Some times these visual accents (key poses) might occur just on one word that you want to emphasise. At other times the gesture might flow across an entire sentence.

Disney animator, Frank Thomas, uses rough thumbnail sketches to work out key poses for a dialogue sequence for Baloo in Jungle Book.

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